The image you see here is of me (left), and my best man in October of 1991, at my wedding.
I sent my box of 17 year old, professionally shot, medium format wedding negatives to ScanCafe about 7 weeks ago. Three days ago, I got a small box back from ScanCafe with all my negatives safely packed inside. In addition to the negatives, the box also contained 7 DVD’s full of high quality tiff files of each image (about 170mb each).
I immediately copied all the tiff files to a folder, then imported them into Lightroom. As I went through each image, the first thing I noticed was that the images had no scratches or dust particles visible, and the color was for the most part dead on. I did finally see one or two images with barely visible dust problems etc, but I have scanned hundreds of negatives in my life, and to scan a negative without dust and scratches is a feat in itself, let alone hundreds in a row.
After I reviewed every precious 17 year old image, and did some slight cropping, and color adjustments, I simply keyworded, dated the images, put them in order (this took most of the day saturday), and added them to my digital library. I have to admit, it is very nice having old shots along with my digital photos at the tip of my fingers.
Overall my opinion of ScanCafe is a resounding “high” recommendation. I plan to send the rest of my negatives to them over the next year or so, and I have boxes, and boxes. I do have to warn you, the time you save in scanning is well worth it, but don’t forget you still have to organize, tag, and date them, and that can steal a few weekends of your life. The payback is seeing the old negatives and slides come to life on your screen, and feeling the emotion as you relive your youth.
Note: I decided to use Lightroom instead of photoshop, because it is much better suited for high speed cropping, color correction, and organization, and I would recommend that you do the same. I would also remind you to actually change the exif data in each image to reflect the actual date they were taken, so your photo library program will put them in the correct place. I will write an article covering this topic in a few days or so.
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